His neighbours do not like him, because he will not take their cricket or their whist seriously, because he will persist in offering counsel and the stimulus of his gift of satire.  All whist than his he avers is “Bumble-puppy.”  His umpiring is pedagogic in tone; he fails to see the contest in the game.  To him, who has heard his thousands roar as the bails of the best of All England went spinning, these village matches are mere puerile exercises to be corrected.  His corrections, too, are Olympian, done, as it were, in red ink, vivid, and without respect of persons.  Particularly he gibes.  He never uses vulgar bad language himself, but has a singular power of engendering it in others.  He has a word “gaby,” which he will sometimes enlarge to “stuppid gaby,” the which, flung neatly into a man who has just missed a catch, will fill the same with a whirl of furious curses difficult to restrain.  And if perchance one should escape, my ancient cricketer will be as startled as Cadmus at the crop he has sown.  And not only startled but pained at human wickedness and the follies of a new generation.  “Why can’t you play without swearing, Muster Gibbs?” he will say, catching the whispered hope twenty yards away, and proclaiming it to a censorious world.  And so Gibbs, our grocer and draper, and one made much of by the vicar, is shamed before the whole parish, and damned even as he desired.

To our vicar, a well-meaning, earnest, and extremely nervous man, he displays a methodical antagonism.  Our vicar is the worst of all possible rural vicars—­unripe, a glaring modern, no classical scholar, no lover of nature, offensively young and yet not youthful, an indecent politician.  He was meant to labour amid Urban Myriads, to deal with Social Evils, Home Rule, the Woman Question, and the Reunion of Christendom, attend Conferences and go with the Weltgeist—­damn him!—­wherever the Weltgeist is going.  He presents you jerkily—­a tall lean man of ascetic visage and ample garments, a soul clothed not so much in a fleshy body as in black flaps that ever trail behind its energy.  Where they made him Heaven knows.  No university owns him.  It may be he is a renegade Dissenting minister, neither good Church nor wholesome Nonconformity.  Him my cricketer regards with malignant respect.  Respect he shows by a punctilious touching of his hat brim, directed to the sacred office; all the rest is malignity, and aimed at the man that fills it.  They come into contact on the cricket-field, and on the committee of our reading-room.  For our vicar, in spite of a tendency to myopia, conceives it his duty to encourage cricket by his participation. Duty—­to encourage cricket!  So figure the scene to yourself.  The sunlit green, and a match in progress,—­the ball has just snipped a stump askew,—­my ancient, leaning on a stout cabbage stick, and with the light overcoat that is sacred to umpires upon his arm.

“Out, Billy Durgan,” says he, and adds, ex cathedra, “and one you ought to ha’ hit for four.”